Please don’t lump in Rugby with soccer. Rugby is a sport of equally vicious hits as football, a true team mentality, manliness, and more nationalism and country pride than ANY liberal could ever handle.
I know, but its appearance in the Ivies suggests that it has gazoot here in the States as a classier, class-proclamatory "non-football football", a way of saying "I'm better than football, football players will spend their lives as my lackeys, aaahahahaaaa!" Or words to that effect. Well, maybe that's Dad talking, who knows.
Maybe in New Zealand and the islands in that part of the world. In the US, it's a snob's game -- "elegant violence," etc.
Even in Britain, it's soccer ("football") that's everyman's game. Rugby may be a rougher game, but a lot of ordinary Brits really loathe it.